He’s Old, Rich and Dying, and Wants His Nephew’s Girl

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The Heir Apparent From left, Paxton Whitehead, Dave Quay and Carson Elrod in David Ives’s adaptation of an 18th-century French comedy at the Classic Stage Company.CreditRuby Washington/The New York Times

“This place is fun! A wondrous mess! I wish my every day knew such excess!”

Thus exults a sour (and very tiny) lawyer in “The Heir Apparent,” David Ives’s adaptation of a little-known 18th-century French comedy by Jean-François Regnard that opened on Wednesday at the Classic Stage Company. Given that this fellow, played with simpering style by David Pittu, has been hoodwinked, humiliated, repeatedly mocked for his diminutive size and generally abused, his outburst may seem surprising.

And yet we in the audience are likely to be smiling in giddy sympathy. This boisterous, bawdy and endlessly funny production, written entirely in rhymed verse and directed with meticulous abandon by John Rando, should put a spring in the step of even those of us beginning to dodder and wilt under the annual end-of-season theater blitz. It is indeed excessively good.

Mr. Ives, the author of Broadway’s kitten-with-a-whip comedy “Venus in Fur,” has begun a profitable sideline in sprucing up plays from the French classical era. His “School for Lies,” a loose adaptation of Molière’s “The Misanthrope,” was previously seen at the same theater. For the new romp, he has turned to a late play from the lesser-known Regnard (1655-1709), but there’s much here that recalls the familiar comic types whose roots are in commedia dell’arte: an avaricious older man ripe for being duped, scheming servants coming to the aid of a couple of young sweethearts desperate to marry. Regnard swiped liberally from situations in both Molière’s “The Miser” and “The Imaginary Invalid,” but his style is less satirical and more akin to a raucous, ribald hell-for-leather farce.

The title character is the dashing young Eraste (Dave Quay), a nephew of the effusively ailing and spectacularly rich Geronte (Paxton Whitehead). Eraste has been cultivating his elderly uncle’s affections for some time. Geronte’s death appears nearer with every revolting expectoration and race to purge his heaving bowels. (This is not a play for those allergic to scatological references, gilt-framed though they are in dainty rhymed couplets; even the clock on John Lee Beatty’s elegant set chimes flatulently.)

Naturally, Eraste believes he will soon have his hands on his uncle’s million francs. This will enable him to wed his beloved Isabelle (Amelia Pedlow), and it will also hasten the coupling of another plighted pair: Geronte’s wily servant, Lisette (Claire Karpen), and Eraste’s resourceful valet, Crispin (Carson Elrod).

Unhappily for all these twittering lovebirds and despite his manifold infirmities, Geronte is not yet ready to be fitted for a shroud. In fact, he’s ready to be measured for his bridegroom’s get-up. He has decided it’s high time he married and has set his sights on none other than Eraste’s comely young love, whom he insists on calling, in one of the show’s few clanking jokes, Georgina. To this announcement the saucy Lisette suggests, “Monsieur, if Satan’s tempted you to wed/Pick someone apropos — like someone dead.”

Desperate to prevent this wedding and secure the loot, the four younger characters begin hatching plots like chickens laying eggs, under the gimlet gaze of Isabelle’s mother, the stern Madame Argante (Suzanne Bertish), who doesn’t care whether her daughter weds uncle or nephew, as long as the gold comes along. Regnard rampages through a series of absurd situations that challenge the ingenuity of Mr. Elrod’s Crispin, the chief mastermind behind the youngsters’ attempts to stall the wedding until Geronte has breathed his last.

Mr. Elrod’s inspired performance is the engine that drives the plot forward at an increasingly breathless pace, even as Mr. Ives’s deftly turned rhymes maintain the reliable rhythms of a minuet. Crispin is called upon to shuffle on and off various personas. He wears a silly coonskin cap to mimic another of Geronte’s nephews, hailing from New York but sporting a ludicrous Texas drawl, who’s supposedly seeking to nab the money himself. He bustles on in curls and bosom and bonnet as another relative, a grasping woman married to a pig farmer, who strews gifts of bacon and sausage around. (“Her note was sweet, but could this girl be gaucher?” Geronte asks, to which Lisette replies, “I’ll tell you this: She isn’t strictly kosher.”) But Crispin’s most challenging role is impersonating Geronte himself, when it appears the old man has finally bit the dust before he has managed to sign his will. “Well, I don’t care what anybody says,” Mr. Elrod’s panting Crispin says in one of many asides to the audience, “I am a one-man Comédie-Française!”

That hallowed institution probably does not host productions of classics as thoroughly retooled as Mr. Ives’s translation, which is lavishly spiced with contemporary slang and up-to-the-minute vulgarities that spring from the prancing verse like little jack-in-the-boxes and never fail to delight with their surprise. When Madame Argante explains her willingness to wed her daughter to any man with sufficient wealth, she says, “I’m really a soccer mom at heart,” after relegating poor Eraste to the “99 percent.”

The entire cast excels. Mr. Whitehead’s Geronte is almost childlike in his greed and need, and maintains a certain courtly charm even when he is nattering on about the state of his bowels. Ms. Bertish’s viperish Madame Argante has an imperious allure, and both of these veterans’ ample background in the classics help them polish Mr. Ives’s verse to a bright glow.

Mr. Quay and Ms. Pedlow make a pair easy to root for, and Ms. Karpen has an earthy deadpan style that well suits her character’s frequent exclamations of disgust at her employer’s behavior. And when he enters, Mr. Pittu whips the heady proceedings into a fine froth as the lawyer Scruple, who attempts to make up for his short stature (under black lawyer’s robes, he shuffles along on his knees) by exuding an outsize air of tetchy exactitude.

Naturally, by the time Mr. Ives has rhymed his last raunchy rhyme, and Crispin has schemed his last mad scheme, the proper pairings have been arranged, and Geronte has been transformed from revolting ogre to gracious benefactor. It is left to Mr. Elrod to muster a final breath and deliver the evening’s brief epilogue: “And if you need a moral, sample this/Don’t try to take it with you. Spread some bliss.”